The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program of low-cost laptops for developing countries has not led to any measurable impact in academic achievement, according to a recent report.

Instead, the study concluded that Peru might be better off spending funding on acquiring and training high-quality teachers, and not investing in technology without complementary instruction.

The paper, published in February, concluded that the "intense access to computers" the program provided "does not lead to measurable effects in academic achievement, but it did generate some positive impact on general cognitive skills."

Specifically, the paper found that students generally improved their ability to operate computers, but showed no statistically significant improvement in math or language skills. In fact, the computers showed no measurable impact on improved attendance or the willingness to do homework, either.

The paper was co-authored by five researchers, and bore the imprint of the Inter-American Development Bank. However, it noted that the work is that of the authors, and is not endorsed by the IADB.

In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at MIT, founded the One Laptop per Child Program, which developed a low-cost laptop to provide computing resources to the developing world. In 2009, OLPC laid plans to develop a tablet. According to Negroponte, the OLPC nonprofit has spun off and set its own agenda, leaving Negroponte's group to pursue its own direction.

The study surveyed 319 public schools across Peru, a country that generally performs on par with other Latin American countries once economic inequalities are taken into effect. The OLPC program in Peru was launched in 2008 with the distribution of 40,000 laptops in
about 500 schools.

One problem immediately manifested itself. One of the OLPC's core principles was that the netbook should be connected to the Internet; however, a lack of connectivity meant that hardly any were. The netbooks ran a range of general software, including a word processor, browser (that could access an on-disk copy of Wikipedia), music recording and playback software, and language tools.

While the study's results were generally disappointing from an educational perspective, the OLPC did seem to help students improve their general cognitive skills across three separate tests covering abstract reasoning, verbal fluency, and processing speed. They included about 4.6 months of progression for a coding test, to six months for verbal fluency and 5.1 months for cognitive skills, compared with a control group.

Unfortunately, the study concluded that the lack of progress in the students' education was a result of the lack of high-quality, complementary instruction that Peru's public schools lacked and needed. "To improve learning in Math and Language, there is a need for high-quality instruction," the report concluded. "From previous studies, this does not seem the norm in public schools in Peru," it said.

"Hence, our suggestion is to combine the provision of laptops with a pedagogical model targeted toward increased achievement by students," the report said. "Our results suggest that computers by themselves, at least as initially delivered by the OLPC program, do not increase achievement in curricular areas."

Peru, however, does not seem to be following that course. About 1.5 million children in Latin America, or 0.5 percent, use an OLPC, the OLPC organization said last month. The paper noted that the ration of PCs to students has increased from 0.28 to 1.18 as a result of the OLPC program. And Peru's urban initiative is giving another 1.5 million students in urban schools access to XOs through a program where groups of 3-5 students share a laptop, it noted.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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